Friday, June 30, 2017

Send Annual Subscription Renewals in Batch from Salesforce

Managing all your customers or donors from Salesforceis a great way to keep track of their history and make sure none of them fall through the cracks. Add WebMerge to your Salesforce org and you can automatically generate all kinds of documents like contracts, thank you letters, receipts, and more.

In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically send out annual subscription renewals from Salesforce to all of our customers with the click of a button.

To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our subscription renewal. We’re going to build this using a Word document. Inside Word, we’re going to add all of our normal info like our logo, contact info, and then for the spots that we want to insert our customer’s details we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$Name}, {$Address}, {$Amount}, etc.

Here’s what our renewal template looks like:

Once we have our template finished, we need to upload it to WebMerge. From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and then enter a name for the document. On the next step, click Office Document then select the file from your computer.

After you have uploaded your template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various options like the type of file that you want to generate and the name of the file. For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and we’ll include the name of our account in the file name.

Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our document so that it is automatically emailed directly to our customer. From the Deliver tab, click the Edit button under the default email delivery. For the To address, we’re going to choose the merge field for our customer’s email address.

If you don’t have a merge field in your document for the customer’s email address, then choose <<Other>> from the dropdown then enter something like {$Email} in the box.

Feel free to edit any of the other settings in the email. You can use merge fields in any of the settings as well.

Once we have our email delivery saved, we are done with the setup process in WebMerge, and we’re ready to setup the integration with Salesforce.

Inside Salesforce under the WebMerge Mappings tab, we’re going to create a New Mapping. Go ahead and enter a name, then for the Object, we’re going to choose Contact. Then we’re going to choose the document that we just setup in WebMerge.

Next, you’ll be taken to a page with more settings for your mapping. Specifically, we want to go to the Field Map section where you’re going to see a list of the merge fields in your template. For each of the merge fields, you need to pick the corresponding Salesforce field from the dropdown on the right.

This tells the system how to pull data from your Salesforce database and send it over to WebMerge so that it’s populated in the correct spot on your template.

Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and Save and Activate your mapping. The last step of the process is going to be settings up a Button on your List View so that we can generate multiple docs (in batch).

Since we’re creating the documents from the Contact record, we need to go to Setup > Customize > Contact > Buttons, Actions, and Links. On this page, we’re going to create a New Button. After we give it a name, we’re going to choose “Execute Javascript” as the behavior and we’re going to show this button on the list view page.

In the big box on the page, we’re going to enter Javascript that will trigger the merge. Click here for a full how-to article with the Javascript code.

Once we’ve created our button, we need to add the button to our list view page by going to Search Layouts, finding the List View layout and clicking the Edit button.

Now, when we go to our Contacts list view page, you should see the button you just created. We’re going to select a list of contacts that we want to send our renewal notice to and click that button. Then you’ll see a message that the documents have been created.

Once you click that button, all the data for those records is sent over to WebMerge and your renewal notices will be generated and sent out. Here’s what our merged notice looked like:

Congrats, you’re finished! You can now automatically generate all kinds of documents (one at a time or in batch) from your Salesforce org. Can you think of any other ways you can use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?